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" I was that kid who made his friends listen to the albums they didn't want to. "

Kamasi Washington

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" West Coast hip hop was the sound of my neighbourhood. It was something I could relate to because it had a sound that felt like my surroundings - almost more so than what they were saying. That music was made to be bumped in a Cadillac! "

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" What fixes your spirit when Ferguson happens? When Trayvon Martin and those kind of things happen, they hurt your spirit; it hurts your heart and your soul. You need something to fix it. "

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" People like to compartmentalise music, especially African-American music, but it's really one thing. One very wide thing. I mean, it's like all those great records by Marvin Gaye and James Brown back in the day - there are tonnes of jazz musicians playing on them. "

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" There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music? "

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" There's a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general. There's a mass of people who are broken. "

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" So much good music has been looked over because of preconceived notions of genre. "

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" My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan, and Whitney Houston. "

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" There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed. "

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" I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop. "

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" I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming. "

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" Funk could very easily be called jazz, but you call it funk. Does that really matter? People dig that they associate themselves with certain genres, but the genres to me are made up things, like an imaginary world. "

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" When I was younger... we used to go to this place called Rexall to play 'Street Fighter.' At Rexall, there would be different people from different hoods there playing the game. It was the one place that was like an equalizer. It was just about how good you were at 'Street Fighter.' "

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" I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn't match.' Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, 'Oh man, that's what I've been trying to do; this is what it's supposed to sound like.' "

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" Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old. "

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" We're the only ones who can change our reality. "

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" The thing about hip-hop is, like, that the instruments were taken out of schools. But - you might have taken the instruments out of schools, but we'll take the records and sing over them! "

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" The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.' "

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" Every time you learn a new language, your understanding of language overall grows, so every time I would learn new music, my understanding of music would grow because I was taken to an extreme in a different direction, and that was, in effect, carrying over into what I do. "

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" When you're making music, you're creeping up on your heart and pouring it out into something. "

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" Becoming a musician is a strange thing. It's not all cupcakes and ice cream. You're trying to master an instrument, and you sometimes can't tell if you're getting better. You love it, but you also hate it. "

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" We've now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We've grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we've heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane. "

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" Someone like Donald Trump can't control the way I show love to my brother. He can't control the way I feel about my neighbors. "

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" As a person who grew up in Los Angeles - that's a very diverse place - I've always felt like that diversity is a blessing. It's not a problem to be solved: it's a gift to be thankful for. "

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" The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans. "

Kamasi Washington

" Jazz is a part of me. "

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" I don't want to live my life to necessarily overcome struggle, but when I am going to hit struggle throughout my life, I face it head on. "

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" Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to 'The Chronic,' there's flute solos and everything. It's always been there. "

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" You have to dig deep to make great music, and it gets harder and harder. It's a difficult, painful process to reach deep in there and pull out the real gems. And you have to have that little bit of anxiety of, 'Can I really do this? Am I good enough?' You need that in the recipe to really get down in there. "

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" When I was working on 'To Pimp A Butterfly' and 'DAMN.,' I'm really making music for Kendrick. It's a different mindset than when I'm making music for me. I'm trying to get into his head and figure out what he wants because it's his vision. That's what I expect from people when they're playing on my records. "

Kamasi Washington

" Music doesn't come out of you, it comes through you. You are almost like a messenger. "

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